20230318 Gutting of the Gospel-V18-trim
The (5%)
True Church
Into The
Little Picture Gospel
(See historical
graph on page 4)
The eternal gospel has a fixed set of doctrines and a fixed set of intended and actual sociological effects, all designed for the benefit of the humans who were to be sent here to the earth. One of the first things changed by the new batch of church leaders, starting especially in 1896, was that this fixed eternal gospel was suddenly made completely unfixed, that is, subject to change at any moment based on the whims and preferences of the leaders. Multiple historical and theological researchers have noted that the LDS church has no fixed theology, but only a tumultuous history, and even that history is constantly subject to constant revisionism. In other words, we have become completely “driven with the wind and tossed" as far as correctly understanding and living the gospel is concerned. Sometimes church members are encouraged to “stay in the good ship Zion,” but that “good ship Zion” is now completely unmoored from, and unguided by, almost every aspect of the eternal gospel, putting it and its passengers at great risk for their salvation in every moment. Perhaps it should be no surprise that hundreds of thousands of past church members find it safer and more sensible to be off that very unstable and exploitative ship.
The earth was generously prepared over great periods of time for a very short period of human habitation of perhaps only 7000 years. In that short time, men were supposed to do amazing and heroic things on earth, partly to demonstrate that if they were assigned to the celestial kingdom they would continue to do amazing and heroic things there on behalf of the next generations of eternal intelligences wishing to follow the long and well-worn path to exaltation. Like the Marines, God is always looking for "a few good men."
Satan wins when he snuffs out and gets rid of all those high-minded ideas of godliness and special programs of progression, and convinces man that he is nothing but a meaningless worm, and therefore that nothing that he does matters at all. If that sense of directionlessness and meaninglessness can be maintained, then no one on this earth will ever make it to the celestial kingdom, and Satan will have won this round.
The LDS Church has slowly dismantled the entire plan of God until the members have accepted this very low-minded pacifist plan of Satan. The lack of direction and meaning in the latter-day church is its most prominent identifying feature today. Personal purity is often emphasized, but any action to improve the world is greatly discouraged. Christ taught that performing charitable works to improve individuals and societies was very valuable itself, and was also of great importance in demonstrating a person’s eligibility for exaltation. Passiveness and pacifism were not on his approved list of qualifications for exaltation, but those are distinctive features of the church today.
Sociologically speaking, the gospel cannot be the real gospel without vigorous free-will charity. That is essentially the only way significant intentional good works can be done. The gospel is intended to provide goals and guides to achieve improvements to human individuals and societies. That is what the exalted concepts and goals of Zion and the Millennium are for. “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” and these are the kinds of visions needed to inspire people to action. There is a job to be done on earth, and a limited time to do it. We are not intended to live forever on earth in our sins, as Babylon imagines, and as the church apparently assumes today.
Assuming the first 6,000 years were up in the year 2000, at this point it appears we are already 23 years behind schedule, with no potential improvements in sight. (Really, we are 127 years behind schedule since it was in 1896 that the church officially abandoned any attempt to add its efforts to meeting the heavenly schedule for the earth, and we have only a limited idea of what needed to be done or could have been accomplished during those times of a distracted and neutralized leadership.) Realistically, today's church members only have two choices – they can gather to Zion and be strengthened and saved temporally, or they can merge with Babylon and be weakened or destroyed. Since the church leaders have officially canceled the gathering portion of the gospel program, a huge majority, if not all of the church is stuck in Babylon with no way to escape, and are left with no way to improve themselves and their social conditions to a Zion level.
God sets goals and rules, and gives instructions and encouragement to find out who will seek to do good no matter what the odds might be. Seeking Zion or preparing a society for the Millennium are not just airy, meaningless phrases but are meant to test men's determination and also to demonstrate to those determined people that a proper application of the Gospel on the earth can indeed lead to those high-minded and remarkable feats of human life and social organization, such evidences adding to their faith in the gospel. (For example, in Mosiah 29:38, King Mosiah convinces the people that they should not desire a king but should desire judges. Judges would maintain their freedom, where kings often would resort to tyranny. Alma the Younger did something similar in Alma 4 to improve the nation through spreading the gospel.)
By removing those key features from the Gospel – building Zion, achieving a Millennium society, executing the gathering of the righteous, using individualized charity and individual priesthood to improve individuals and the more general society, emphasizing that men can learn to be gods by practicing these principles, and exercising faith that these gospel programs can succeed – that almost completely disabled gospel program becomes boring and lifeless. If you remove all of these unique features of Mormonism, as has been done, then most of the gospel magic is gone and all you have left is a mundane, constantly deteriorating world, with nothing but the normal atheistic humanism of every other religion on the planet. (See Fourth Nephi.)
Christ demonstrated the proper use of charity and the priesthood. “Eternal charity" is the mission of the gospel and should be the mission of all church members. Charity is the underlying gospel strategy for action, as is made clear in the New Testament. An individualized priesthood adds further power to the strategy of charity. Sensing that, Satan does all he can to minimize and remove any individualized priesthood power. The Roman Catholic Church has finally accomplished that, so that the millions of "lay" members have no priesthood whatsoever. The LDS church is carefully following in their path. The first big removal of individual priesthood power, which occurred in 1890, involved centralizing the power of the patriarchs, making them unable to use the sealing powers locally in the stakes at no cost as was previously the case. Those sealing powers were then monetized through the constant preaching of tithing and temple work together which ensures a constant flow of free tithing money, even to an embarrassing degree, as the church’s huge money stashes have been revealed. Other steps seem to be in progress to continue that process of reducing nearly all members to powerless "laity." It appears that charity and priesthood power rise and fall together.
The graph below is intended to show exactly how, step-by-step, all of the unique, intentionally uplifting features of Mormonism, and all the intended means of societal progress for Mormons and their host nation, have been wiped out by the church, presumably because such activities seem to the leaders to be too troublesome and expensive to execute, leaving us with no goals and no plans whatsoever that match with God's intent for man.
Perhaps the last thing to fall was the very concept that man could become God. Since we don't teach that anymore, or encourage anyone to learn and exercise the necessary habits and powers, why would anyone be so foolish as to imagine that they could accomplish that, reach for that, and actually attempt to be a person who contributes to the work of the celestial Kingdom? That person will certainly receive no help and guidance in that quest from a passive, largely humanist church which appears to have no goals whatsoever, for themselves or for anyone else, except maintaining the status quo forever. That kind of quest and adventure to achieve Zion has all been stamped out. One might as well be a Buddhist as a Mormon today. Little is expected of a Buddhist, whose highest hope and desire is to cease to exist as a conscious entity. Obviously, the concept of good works that will have significance in heaven has no meaning to a Buddhist, and there is little real difference with today's Mormons.
Based on the gospel which Joseph Smith taught, there ought to be the largest possible difference between the Buddhist who simply wants to cease to exist, and the Mormon who sees eternally expanding opportunities for work and service to benefit others. However, with Mormonism now closely approaching Buddhism on the question of the importance of life and of heaven, there is very little difference between the two.
Mormons who have ambitions for themselves in heaven are mocked by Christianity in general for imagining that they can crawl out of this dingy mortal bucket and enter the celestial kingdom, be recognized as gods, and be given the tasks of gods after this life. If no one seeks for such a goal and no one accomplishes it, then Satan will have managed to have the batch of humanity which came to this earth be registered on the salvation scale as a complete waste, and be considered a lost investment.
This reminds me of the extremely complex systems used to make computer chips today. These machines and processes are so complex that it's very difficult to create chips that are perfect enough to actually work. Often a majority of the chips that are made are unusable. But even a small percentage of these remarkable devices are enough to change the world with the computing power they offer.
A short review of some of the original strenuous efforts to gather the saints and build Zion in our time appears at the end of this article.
Explaining
the Graph Below
Diluting
the gospel with the preferences and philosophies of men until there is almost
nothing left
The decline, fall, and extremely unlikely resurrection of the LDS church.
This is a little bit like the decline
and fall of the Roman Empire (which was supposedly followed by the Holy Roman
Empire, which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire). Similarly, the LDS
Church today is only the tiniest, faintest shadow of its original self,
estimated at 5% still intact. To the extremely limited extent that it is an
"empire" today, what is left is to its shame, not to its glory. It has no business doing any of that. "My kingdom is not of this world"
was Christ's message, although it has had an enormous indirect effect on the
kingdoms of this world, because it became the basis for Western civilization
with its emphasis on individual freedom.
Critical points of doctrinal and procedural change
1896 – Church leaders officially
installed priestcraft by beginning leadership salaries. All future gospel
destruction was foreshadowed, and the way was prepared for more radical
changes. (Many reactions and consequences were delayed and became lagging
indicators of important changes.)
– New Testament charity officially
ended, Old Testament-style mandatory tithing begun. The gospel is simply not
the real gospel without vigorous free-will charity. Its character is completely
changed.
– An estimated 52% drop from original
Gospel -- allocate 50% to loss of charity, 2% to introduction of tithing as its
replacement.
– Church begins religious war on family
and society for its own centralized benefit, even worse than war on family and
society by civil governments. Birthrate drops because of extra living costs,
more from church taxes than from civil taxes. Paying tithing can eliminate two
or more children from each family, just as civil taxation can eliminate two or
more children from each family.
– Centralize sealing ordinances so they
can be monetized. Begin extinction of local powers of stakes by removing
sealing powers from local patriarchs, likely leading eventually to extinction
of all local lay priesthood (only partially complete in 2020, but still
following Roman Catholic precedents and pattern as local seventies disappear
and local high priests are denigrated.)
– Church leaders then and now are
potentially guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost. They deny the atonement and teachings of
Christ himself, with so many of his teachings related to charity, and demand
that He do it all again to convince them again that they need to straighten out
all their intentional errors. More
specifically, the temptations He endured and resisted at the beginning of His
ministry concerning fame, money, and power, the new leaders have eagerly
embraced, obliterating everything He attempted to accomplish. All that is left of the gospel of Christ is
an empty shell.
Text of
points on the graph:
1830 full gospel
restored +100%
1896 -- officially
installed priestcraft, start leader salaries -50%
1899 justify
priestcraft, drop charity, add tithing, facilitate all future changes -2%
1910 Declare
cancellation of Christ's original gospel -1%
1923 drop common
consent, take all property -10%
1935 Drop US
constitution, fully abandon charity -10%
1938 Church goes
globalist, abandons freedom -5%
1909-1978 take money
and power from women -2%
1960 Enforce tithing
with recommends -5%
1977 Gathering and Zion
ended -5%
2010 cumulative changes
-3%
2020 current status only
5% left
1899 – Begin to justify and enhance 1896 priestcraft initiation -- Begin to preach and justify Old Testament-style mandatory tithing/tax, necessarily ending the previous free-will charity.
1910 – The early church leaders apparently decided to pretend that they knew almost nothing about the administrative details of the original church of Christ, and that there was no way to learn about it accurately, even though supposedly they were prophets and should be able to learn and discern such things. This claim of ignorance was very beneficial to a priestcraft mindset. Without actually saying so clearly, the book The Great Apostasy by James E. Talmage, 1910, argues that we know so little about the original church which Christ himself set up during his mortal life, that the latter-day church leaders can assume and declare almost anything they want to about it. Especially, they assert by implication that they can declare Old Testament-style mandatory tithing to have been an original doctrine of Christ during his living ministry, even though that makes no historical or doctrinal sense whatsoever. Also, it makes it clear that the new church leaders are, first of all, very self-centered administrators, and only as a very distant second, competent religious historians and theologians.
Also, by implication, the book The Great Apostasy explains the LDS plan to copy the path of the Catholic church in its quest for a worldwide temporal kingdom based on the use of force and deceit, not legitimate persuasion. The phrase "buy up armies and navies…" comes to mind (meaning to create enforcing bureaucracies for a temporal empire). Christ had no bureaucracies and had no need of them. The gospel is always destroyed by paid bureaucracies as can be easily demonstrated by the church itself, past and present.
Events in 1896 and 1899 indicate that the church leaders had already decided to impose Old Testament-style mandatory tithing on the church members in a set of gradual steps. It seems likely that they researched this potential policy change and, in the process, decided that an historical and intellectual challenge to such a major and important policy change could only come from a possible study of documents found outside the scriptures that have survived to our time. There are indeed strong hints within the surviving scriptures that the Old Testament principle of mandatory tithing was necessarily excluded from the early Christian church, along with all other aspects of the burdensome law of Moses, including circumcision, as seen in the discussion with the Judaizers who presented and lost their arguments soon after the death of Christ. Christ himself exemplified and emphasized those anti-Law of Moses and anti-tithing evidences and arguments, but, unfortunately, the words we have in our remaining scriptures are not absolutely clear and unambiguous, beyond question. Perhaps that situation caused the 1910 church leaders to attempt the ploy of offering a preemptive study to "clarify" that point in their favor. At least three recent books finally challenge some of their very questionable assertions.1
1923 – Central church takes all church property, and leaves members with nothing. Meaningful common consent ends. The church leaders have been relentless in their desire to centralize power, a very unchristian thing to do. Similarly, "You will own nothing and be happy" is the apparent mantra of today's radical globalists.
1935 – Church officially abandons last vestiges of New Testament charity by supporting the new "government charity" tax-and-spend Social Security system without even attempting to implement an explicitly allowed substitute. In effect, the central church executes a bait-and-switch strategy and now gets to keep and squander ALL tithing receipts, with no charity expanse demands whatsoever, having outsourced all charity/welfare responsibilities to civil government. This signals the beginning of the end of the Christian religion in the United States, and therefore in the world. Religions now have no place in normal societal operations involving actual movement of resources – they are reduced to mere counseling centers.
1938-1942 –The church officially removes from the Book of Mormon the story about Captain Moroni and his constant quest for freedom for church members, and thus officially declares the end of LDS support for the US Constitution.
– The First Presidency’s 1942 statement
on war in effect declares the central church’s intent to operate above all
Gospel and worldly laws. The church declares a "United Nations-style"
global kingdom that accepts Satan's goals, not Christ’s goals. Church chooses to support all the tyrants of
the earth as possible future supporters of a (Satanist) one-world government
and related religion (they apparently hope to supply).
– Church supports tyrants
of the world more than supporting US Constitution, government, and
society. Agrees with globalists that
America must fall to allow expansion of globalism and globalist government.
– Church panders to Nazism by doing
nothing to help rescue Jews, not even Mormon Jews. Church panders to communism during Cold War
by trading defeat of MX missile system in Western states for temple in communist
East Germany.
1909-1978 (series of actions) – Take all money and power from the women of the Church, part of obliterating the principle of charity from the church.2
1960 – Finalize priestcraft religious extortion and related regulations by denying previously free higher ordinances to anyone who does not pay mandatory Old Testament-style tithing to the central offices, officially creating a new business model for the church, maximizing tithing (extracted from a naturally shrinking church). Fabricate new church history theories concerning D&C 119 to help justify new tithing and temple recommend regulations.
1977 – Officially end the gathering, officially end striving for Zion and the Millennium
2010 – cumulative changes – Begin to denigrate and replace scriptures themselves with new teachings of living leaders. -- Dare not yet go so far as to try to prevent the masses from reading the scriptures themselves as the Catholics were able to do in an age without the printing press (or the Internet) -- However, the doctrines actually taught bear little relationship to the content of the scriptures, and especially to the spirit of the scriptures. "Living prophets" have given themselves such powers that they imagine they can change any part of the Gospel at any time, meaning that the words of all past prophets have been superseded, and now merely serve to supply a body of (familiar sounding) words to use in any way desired.
– Elements of all the confused religions
of the earth are taught in place of true Gospel elements, adopted for
convenience from Catholic, Protestant, Asian pagan religions, etc. The
equivalent of Confucian ancestor worship has now become a very important LDS
doctrine, since it so thoroughly supports temple worship and paying tithing to
the central offices.
– Officially abandon works as the
measure of salvation, and adopt Protestant version of grace, requiring no human
responsibility whatsoever to achieve salvation beyond making a simple statement.
– Officially abandon concept of
celestial kingdom and any special requirements to get there. Instead, adopt and adapt Catholic,
Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and other religious concepts of
"heaven." Concept of "man
can become God" is officially abandoned.
Adopt concepts of "cosmic justice" to preach universal
salvation. However, that "universal
salvation" can only lead to the terrestrial kingdom, at most, not to the
celestial kingdom.
– Officially adopt atheistic organic
evolution as the approved biological science taught at BYU. Where a BYU
professor was fired in 1911 for teaching evolution, today BYU enthusiastically and
dogmatically supports teaching evolution. It is philosophically impossible to claim
that theism and atheism are both completely true at once. Either God created
the earth and its living organisms or he didn't. This makes the LDS church an
enthusiastically humanist church, making a mockery of the scriptures that
declare God's great powers and his extensive plans for his children.
2020, current status – Almost all we have left is the name of the Church itself. Baptism is okay, sacrament is okay, but nearly everything else unique is gone. Is baptism by immersion all we have left to distinguish us?
– Church has fully merged with Marxist
globalist Satanist factions. Is now doctrinally indistinguishable from the Roman
Catholic church, its mentor and competitor. This brings to mind the fourth
century A.D. merger of the Christian church with the pagan cult of the Emperor
Constantine.
– The church seems to follow the lead of
all the anti-freedom globalists, including on such as issues as gun control,
vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and even abortions.
– Zion has been canceled, Millennium has
been canceled, Constitution has been canceled, defense of freedom has been canceled.
– Church strives to continue income from
pagans buying indulgences (paying tithing). (Apparently pagans pay better than
real Christians.)
– Today’s church must be
completely replaced or it remains meaningless.
Scriptural comments on confused leaders
Some seemingly relevant scriptures
addressing current church leaders who are so strongly focused on amassing
wealth from members:
Luke
12:16-31
18
And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and
there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.
19
And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years;
take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
20
But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of
thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?
21
So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.
Also, Daniel 5 gives us a hint as to what should happen to the self-perpetuating leadership class in today's LDS Church:
Daniel
5:25-28
25
And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
26
This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom,
and finished it.
27
TEKEL; thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting
28
PERES; thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
It is long overdue that the eternal gospel and the physical LDS Church be separated and gospel administration given to those who will magnify it.
Today, LDS church growth is near zero. Few people want to join this strange and troublesome historical relic of a religion that contributes nothing to uplifting and saving our nation, any more than the good people of the world want to join any other of the many now-turned-leftist burned-out hulks of human organizations. This brings to mind "dead men's bones:"
Matthew
23:27
27
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited
sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead
men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
Notes
Many dates are approximate in this
version of the graph and its explanation.
Many of those dates could be expressed more precisely with more
extensive studies of external and internal church communications and records.
This graph raises hundreds of important questions and issues, exactly as it was intended to do. Much is based on careful research, but, for lack of time, much is still left to undocumented theory to fill in many gaps. It would likely take a few thousand pages of carefully researched and documented studies to explain it all in detail. Some of those details are in my published and unpublished books already, but "tying it all up with an exhaustive academic bow" is probably beyond my human limitations and available time, although if I live to be a hundred, that might be long enough. A serious church would prepare for and present such a definitive study of the Gospel, a suitable Constitution for the church, but at this point, any such document prepared by the central church would be a fraud.
For much more detail, see the accumulated studies at FutureMormonism.blogspot.com. Find there the full text of six books, five of them published, and more.
The perfect outcome would be to have someone take my outline and then delve deeply into the church archives to find more detailed data on each point. I'm highly confident that I have a good outline, but that outline would be greatly strengthened with transcripts and other detailed sources of information from within the church itself. I once visited the church historian's office to look up a fairly uncontroversial published book. It was certainly nothing for the employees there to be distraught about. However, the high level of tension and paranoia even over my simple request convinced me that it would be a very bad idea to try to find out the truth using their resources. It would most likely be a continuing source of conflict, with the process most likely to end with my being denied access before I could even begin to answer the many questions I had and would generate along the way. Thus, only public sources and personal experiences could supply my research materials.
The “restored church” could be restored again and resuscitated by undoing all of the devastating changes of the last 127 years, but that seems extremely unlikely to ever happen. As with the parable in the New Testament, the church leaders would rather create new barns to hold their winnings, their ill-gotten gains, even though they will all die having accomplished nothing of importance, leaving behind an absolute wreck of a gospel heritage, and accomplishing only the tiniest speck of what the Gospel was intended to be and do in our time. The level of group cynicism and willful blindness required to reach this point indicates an enormous depth of stubbornness to continue along their chosen track at all costs. Some of this might be called the new "traditions of the fathers" like those described in the Book of Mormon.
Other lines to be superimposed on this graph:
Growth rate Effects
The church’s original real growth rates
fluctuated wildly up-and-down in the first 40 years, 1830-1869, with a maximum
of 4,567% growth in the first year, and a minimum of -13.53% in 1857, so that
an average growth rate doesn't have much meaning. The computed average is
138.76%, the median is 6.88%. For simplicity, I am going to very roughly estimate
that the inherent growth rate begins at about 20%, drops to about 6% in 1896,
begins in 1960 to decline from 6% to 0%, and probably begins negative growth in
2018, with the entire church slated to be obliterated along with the entire
society (see Fourth Nephi account), having done very little in over 100 years to
preserve itself or its host nation.
Freedom effects/Tyranny effects
The decay graph for the gospel is exactly the same as the religious freedom decay graph for church members. The reciprocal graph is the increase in the level of tyranny wielded by church leaders and by the corrupt civic leaders they support, Because of the church leaders’ inaction in defending the nation's freedom, tyranny has been growing steadily within our nation.
Long-term liability considerations
Because of its extremely self-centered
perspective and lack of societal leadership, the LDS church can be held largely
accountable for every loss of religious and political freedom in the United
States and the world since about 1910, simply because the church leaders had the
correct societal answer and refused to proffer and demonstrate and defend it. As
an interesting analogy, the legal liability doctrine of "last clear
chance" makes the LDS church guilty in large part for our current societal
train wreck. The LDS church had a clear chance to do something in the last 100
years to improve our society, and they did almost nothing at all. If they did
not want to take action, they should have invited someone else to take that
action in their stead, rather than be responsible for failure.
The LDS church has extracted about $1 trillion from its members in the last 100 years, with relatively little to show for that enormous amount of money, but far more important is the approximately $100 trillion in good works that the LDS church probably prevented from being done by discouraging spontaneous good works, partly by imposing a large tax on religion called tithing while fraudulently claiming that that tithing rule was the correct doctrine of Christ in the New Testament, and by being a bad example itself by not vigorously using charitable actions to improve individuals and our society. If the LDS church had properly shown the way, it is quite probable that their own efforts at good works would have been multiplied 100 times over by other people following their many good examples. The relatively small amount of good works which the central church has done with its funding is mostly akin to the "give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day" kind of charity rather than teaching men how to be free and economically independent in the long-term.
Some of the early efforts at gathering the Saints and building Zion
Zion
Some may be surprised to hear that we actually
have an Article of Faith that speaks of building Zion on the American continent
and of other marvelous things to come, made possible through coordinated member
efforts:
10 We believe in the literal agathering of Israel and in the restoration of
the bTen Tribes; that cZion (the New Jerusalem) will be built
upon the American continent; that Christ will dreign personally upon the earth; and, that
the earth will be erenewed and receive its fparadisiacal gglory.
Of course, it is very inconvenient to be expected to work so hard to do some things that are so specific, so one can be sure that our current leaders have done everything they can to quietly convince us that this "Zion" business is nonsense and has nothing to do with our gospel. The church leaders probably wish they could edit this particular Article of Faith out of our Scriptures, and will probably manage it at some point. It is greatly to their political and personal advantage for the LDS people to be completely passive about everything that matters in our society, and they have quite perfectly accomplished that. We don't even think of those kinds of things anymore.
However, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young took this "Zion" business very seriously. Joseph Smith drove the gathering to Kirtland and Independence and Nauvoo, at great cost to himself and everyone else, including the 80,000 people who came from Europe to beef up the ranks of the church members, and there were at least that many added by the time the saints finally got settled in Utah. Some people have referred to this as the English rescue of the church. I believe it was in about 1862 that the British members made up about 83% of the entire church membership.
Brigham Young got the Saints organized to get out of Nauvoo, and then created Winter Quarters, and then pressed on to Utah, which was finally an eminently defensible position against all the raging of the world. A trek across 1500 miles of open prairie is enough to dampen the ardor of even the most radical enemies. Another item that has gone down the LDS memory hole, compliments of our current church leaders, is the fact that it was the efforts of the southern slavers to make slavery a nationwide rule that was underlying almost everything which the Mormons did or experienced during that time period. Someone needs to write a book about this, but the Saints were constantly in conflict with the slavers from the moment they got to Missouri. (It is unpleasant to realize that God must have planned for all of this trouble for the Mormons, because otherwise they probably never would have made it through all the torment to get to Utah unless their lives were constantly threatened and they were forced to constantly move West.)
At that point Missouri was a slave state and there were slave plantations along the biggest river and it was the slavers who were attacking the church members at the voting locations and other places. Obviously, the worst thing that could happen to the slavers was to have people coming in from the north who hated slavery and would vote against it and thus could end slavery in Missouri. This was a plenty good reason to kill anyone who came in, or at least rough them up a lot. They both killed church members and destroyed their property. The extermination order was put out for the exact purpose of getting the Mormons out of Missouri so their anti-slavery voting block would not continue to threaten the slave status of Missouri. And they didn't stop with merely getting the Saints out of Missouri. It was the Missourians who finally killed Joseph Smith, apparently hoping that would finally end their problem with the Mormons, but of course it did not.
Another point which most people don't know about, is that someone made the political calculation that 30,000 anti-slavery church members moving into the western territories would make sure that the slave laws never made it into the western territories. That made it very important for the proslavery people to wipe out the Mormons before they ever had a chance to get into those western territories (and thus could prevent a nationwide slavery law). The slavers did make several attempts to wipe out the Mormons, about six in all, many more attempts than anyone ever lists. That includes the Mormon Battalion, which was the forced induction at gunpoint of 500 Mormon men who were organized as a prisoner battalion with two other battalions to guard them. The plan, of course, was that these 500 strong men who were critical to the Mormons making it out west, would somehow be killed on their marches and fighting, and the Mormons would never make it out West. It is quite interesting to see how God turned their machinations for good so that the Mormons ended up well supplied with guns and money when they finally got to California and then made it back to Utah. That put them in a better position to resist the Army coming to Utah a few years later in 1857.
Once the Mormons did get there to Utah, the US government sent out an army to try to destroy or scatter the Mormons from Utah and then move on to California to do something similar. If they could convert Utah and California from free states to slave states, that would tip the balance in the House of Representatives so that they could pass a law which would make the entire nation subject to slavery. By neutralizing the Army that was sent to Utah, the Mormons made it so that the scheming slavers had no more semi-peaceful political options to accomplish their goals of universal slavery, and had to switch to the Civil War option, which they very foolishly did. Johnson's army in Utah was unable to do a thing, because in 1857, when the Army started out there, the Mormons could field about 20,000 very tough mountain man to oppose their 2500 soldiers. As Brigham Young made very clear, if the Army made any trouble, not a single one of them would make it back to the Eastern states alive, and the Mormons wouldn't even have to break a sweat to defeat or destroy them. That overwhelming threat of force, potentially applied guerrilla-style, helped keep the peace.
This reminds me of the Zion of Enoch where he could call down fire or mountains or wild animals on enemies, and they would soon find it wiser to go away. Brigham Young did something similar with this pre-Civil War US Army, made up of a Texas-based slave-owning commanding officer and a majority of southern-based troops.
I think it was interesting that the Mormon raiders on the plains made sure that very few of the supply trains for the Army ever made it to the Army. I believe in most cases they simply destroyed the wagons and the supplies, and then took the draft animals and drove them down to Salt Lake Valley. The Army spent a very unpleasant winter in Wyoming, and when they came down to Salt Lake City in the spring, by that time, at least 2000 of their draft animals were already in Salt Lake Valley, there to help out the Mormons with their transportation needs. This sounds a little like the current war in Ukraine, where Russia is the biggest supplier of military equipment to the Ukrainian Army.
My point here is that the current church leaders have successfully memory-holed any concepts of Zion or the Millennium, both intended to be improved societies created by vigorous gospel action, and have thus effectively squelched any church members having any thoughts about making any efforts to get there. That represents cutting a giant hole in the gospel for the convenience of our priestcraft theologians who now have control of the church. They see it as their duty to make sure that the church never makes any headway on the social progress front whatsoever, anywhere in the world. We are required to sit passively and watch the destruction of our own country, according to them. The Gadiantons have extreme power in our society today, but the central church pretends they see no problems at all.
The gathering
The church leaders more explicitly
canceled another principle of the gospel which feeds into the principle of
building Zion. That is the principle of "the gathering." Bruce R.
McConkie did that by remote control in about 1977. He gave a talk in Peru in
which he basically canceled the gathering, and his idea was ratified later by
Salt Lake City. (I assume this was the plan all along – you send someone to
some remote place to make a statement and then, depending on the fallout,
decide whether to go ahead or not. It's called a trial balloon.).3
If the membership of the church is scattered throughout the world, with a concentration of less than 2% everywhere, and barely even noticeable in many places, then of course one cannot change the local society because one has no recognized political power to do so. In Utah, there is a majority of Mormons, but they are all extremely passive, so that they rarely do anything to solve any problems on the path to Zion.
If all the good people are gathered in one place, many millions strong, then they can make the society anything they want, and they can use democratic political methods to do it. They can also eject anyone who gives them any trouble, just like the Utah Mormons ejected the U.S. Army.
I think under the rules of life on earth, one cannot have a Zion without a gathering, and if the gathering is rejected then Zion is rejected. This is the infallible logic of our priestcraft theologians and sociologists. Naturally, I would like to see a worldwide gathering which can then allow a Zion to happen almost spontaneously. If all the good people are in one place, they are going to do the right things without any need for any aggressive political plans. If the good people are scattered very thinly, then they become the victims, not the people there who can control their own society and destiny.
Can and should the LDS church become a world church?
As things stand, the LDS church most certainly is not a world church, and, lucky for the world, cannot ever become a world church without a complete overhaul. If the church is teaching and exemplifying only 5% of Christ's original gospel, as noted above, with the other 95% representing nothing more than an enormous accumulation of human philosophy barnacles on the ship of Zion, then it would be a complete fraud to claim that the church is teaching the gospel of Christ. Again, luckily, a very large portion of the inhabitants of our world are not so easily tricked as the historical and cultural DNA Mormons, and wisely keep their distance from this church. Instead of relying on the beliefs and actions of their forefathers to keep them in the church, the rest of the Earth's people will need to see some good proofs upfront before they will sign on.
We need to talk about definitions a little bit. In his somewhat famous 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington describes the world's population as being part of 9 different world religions each with their own associated world civilization. According to his assumptions, the religions came first, defining the moral basis for particular kinds of civilizations, and then that was followed by actually building or assembling civilizations on those first principles.
In other words, when we see a world civilization which is built on the principles of the restored gospel, then, and only then, will we be able to say that the LDS church has become a world religion. As things stand, we have nothing even close to that situation. Having a handful of church members in most of the countries of the world is not at all the same as having a world religion. If all of those countries are not operating on the basis of the restored gospel, then they are not part of the civilization based on the restored church. We don't even have the state of Utah as an example of a piece of a civilization built on the principles of a particular religion. There is indeed a local religion which has a fairly large amount of influence in the state of Utah, but really only at the 5% level, or slightly more, not at the 100% level.4
If God prepared this Earth as a place for his children to come to gain experience, and He introduced the gospel here to show them how to live properly, then when those instructions on how to live properly on the earth have been dissolved away by innate human foolishness, then the earth and its guiding gospel can no longer fulfill their purpose, their mission. In the past, when the truth was lost, whole civilizations were destroyed, and, in the case of Noah and the flood, essentially the entire world was reset back to near zero. The lesson to be learned here is that God will eventually take whatever actions are necessary to keep the earth as a good place for his children to come to gain experience, and the gospel and the related church organization are put here as God’s agent to make sure that the right conditions are maintained.
At this point, it is perfectly clear that the LDS church was supposed to be a second dose of the gospel, to follow up the original dose of the gospel which Christ brought himself to the earth. But, since the LDS church has been watered down almost to the point of meaninglessness, it can hardly be doing what Christ intended it to do, that is, start with the Western civilization which was built on the original teachings of Christ, and then take that civilization to new levels of freedom and prosperity and righteousness. Obviously, the current-day church is doing none of that. They are completely living off the fat of the land, consuming the fruits of the work of Christ himself, and giving back nothing. In that sense they are parasites on the gospel. They are seeking rent from the powerful principles of the gospel, rather than trying to help expand the influence of that full 100% gospel so that many more millions can enjoy all the blessings of the gospel.
The LDS church seems to have adopted the McDonald's strategy for international growth. The McDonald's Corporation is interested in nothing more complicated than selling billions of hamburgers and collecting a lot of money in the process. They have calculated that if they remain as quiet as possible and make no efforts whatsoever to change the cultures of the countries they operate in, then they will be allowed by the ruling tyrants to operate in those countries, returning in taxes and through other means some of the fruits of their labors.
This may indeed be a successful business strategy in today's world, but it is completely the wrong strategy for any organization which claims to be, and hopes to be, a world religion. Its goals should not be simply selling religious meetings in the place of hamburgers, and collecting money to Salt Lake City for providing that service. Its main assignment should be to actually change the various cultures of the world for the better, so that freedom and righteousness and prosperity become the norm. That is basically the definition of building Zion and the Millennium. Since the church is not attempting to do any of this sort of thing, raising up people of the world to the highest possible spiritual and temporal condition, then it cannot be a legitimate representative of God.
Rather than take on the huge task of leading the world to adopt a new civilization, with the church setting the moral standards for that new world civilization, the LDS church has chosen to locate and adapt itself to a lowest common denominator in world civilizations, meaning that the existing civilizations of the world set the moral standards for the church, which, of course, is completely backwards.
The LDS church prides itself in not only having no debt, but instead having hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank. That may indeed be the measure of success for a McDonald's-style worldly business, but that has nothing to do with the responsibilities of Christ's church on earth. We might notice that Joseph Smith took enormous personal financial risks to get the Saints moved westward in several incremental steps. In each case he contracted for up to 250 mi.² of land at a time, and promised that that land would be paid for by the donations and purchases of the church members who moved to those locations in Kirkland and Independence and Nauvoo.
Some people laugh at Joseph Smith for having many unpaid debts at many points in his life, but they don't usually bother to mention that those debts were nearly all contracted on behalf of getting the Saints moved to new places where they needed to be. We have an interesting place in the Scriptures which tells us that it is perfectly fine for the church to be in debt to the moneychangers of the world, especially if it is in such a good cause as moving to Jackson County, Missouri. The Lord told Joseph Smith that the money of the world belonged to the Lord, and if Joseph Smith was using it for a good cause, then it was not necessarily even his problem to pay it back. (D&C 64:27-29; 104:78-86)
The church leaders today would probably say that this borrowing on an enormous scale was wildly irresponsible. But they are speaking as a mundane worldly profit-making business, and all that matters to them is the profit. However, the truth is, that the church has a mission to change the world on behalf of the church members, and almost any level of “business” risk that is needed to make those changes is justified in the eyes of the Lord. In other words, an interesting test of the determination of the church leaders today to do the right thing would be to see them spend for good purposes the $150 billion they have in the bank, and then to borrow another $200 billion to take on some other valuable tasks that would directly help the church members and the states and nations in which they live.
The church purity/size trade-off
On the
general church growth issue, it appears to me that the LDS church leaders have
decided that the perfect "sweet spot" for those church leaders is
exactly where we are today.
Today’s sweet spot for church purity/size/income/leadership
burden/member acceptance
They have
arranged things so that they have no responsibility (and therefore no expense)
to do anything to improve the world, but they are still receiving perhaps $20
billion a year, which happens to be about twice as much as they dare spend each
year for various reasons. If they spend it on themselves, that conspicuous
consumption would probably get them in trouble with church members (City Creek
comes to mind). If they spend that money for doing good in the world that
improves freedom and prosperity, especially in the United States, they will
instantly come into conflict with a jealous, power-hungry Marxist federal
government which will quickly start to persecute and punish them. Religions are
the Marxists biggest enemies. Tyrants in other countries would almost certainly
do the same thing.
As it is,
the church is accumulating far more money then they dare spend. One solution to
that would be to have the church shrink to one half the size it is today. A
smaller number of tithe payers would get their income down to a more manageable
size, while still providing all the money they would dare spend. That would
probably solve many of the problems of the current church leaders, but that in
turn might cause church members to wonder what is going on, if the church is
obviously failing on a grand scale as it shrinks noticeably. The central church
constantly talks about "gathering Zion" these days, while doing
everything imaginable to make sure that Zion is NOT gathered, at least on the
living side of the veil. This demonstrates some of the many built-in conflicts
within the church's thinking and actions today.
Below is an
additional insert concerning the interaction between church purity -- church
doctrinal and policy and behavioral purity -- and church size.
This graph
is my intuitive representation of what I believe are the church growth
possibilities. As I say, the church seems to have found a sweet spot where it
can have all the money it can possibly spend, plus more, but it hardly has any
responsibility at all to improve the society around it. It has become purely a
rent-seeking organization and seems to like it that way. It first set up an
unauthorized tithing system, arguably based on the general principle of
charity, and then managed to transfer all the possible charity costs to the
federal government, so that the church has essentially no charity expenses, and
yet receives and keeps the full tithing income. What could be better?
The growth
chart is tied to church purity in terms of its exactness in following the New
Testament principles of the gospel. The church is currently at a fairly stable
sweet spot, where church purity/size relationship could go up and down a little
bit and it basically changes nothing. However, if the church were to move even
further to the left, policy-wise, that is, to even further dilute what is left of
the original gospel, then it could conceivably quickly move towards zero size
as the best and most faithful members leave in droves and in disgust. On the
other hand, if the church were to move its policies and behaviors and doctrines
back to the right, that is towards the true substance of Christ's gospel as he
taught it during his life on earth, then the church could grow quickly to a
much greater size. I haven't tried to predict when any particular policy might
be changed by the church. If and when it gets rid of the mandatory Old
Testament-style tithing rules, and adopts New Testament charity as the real and
proper rule for all church interactions, at that point the size of the church
would make an enormous jump. Since I have no idea when that might happen, I
have simply presented a fairly constant line from today's 5% purity level to
the ideal 100% purity level.
The
rewind option
In
general, if the church were to rewind its 127 years of dilution of the gospel
back to the beginning in 1896, it would then likely reacquire the approximately
20% growth rate that was going on in the 1896 timeframe, but which immediately
dropped to about a 6% growth rate until about 1960, and then gradually dropped
to the approximately zero growth rate that we see today. With this second graph,
I have tried to simplify the most likely size parameters that would occur based
on changes in purity parameters.
Footnotes
1. Gregor McHardy, Eight Myths of the Great Apostasy (Salt lake City, Signature Books, 2022)
Miranda Wilcox, Standing Apart: Mormon
Historical Consciousness and the Concept of Apostasy (Oxford University
Press, 2014)
Kent W Huff, Is The Church As True As
The Gospel?: A Constitutional Approach (Amazon, 2020)
2. How Mormon Women Were Correlated Out of LDS Church Finances
https://ordainwomen.org/how-mormon-women-were-correlated-out-of-lds-church-finances/
3. Bruce R. McConkie, “Come: Let Israel Build Zion,” February 27, 1977 in Lima, Peru. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1977/04/come-let-israel-build-zion?lang=eng
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
Below is the Google Drive link for this document. That PDF version has a better graphic image and better formatting in general.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13L7TSn4Favr1MtNDXaRVuWkFiqmOmmF-/view?usp=share_link
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